Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Wednesday, March 07, 2012

Air Canada’s biggest union has signalled its intention to strike and will be legally able to do so at 12.01 a.m. Monday. My advice to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers: Don’t bother wasting your time printing the picket signs.

If federal Labour Minister Lisa Raitt was prepared to step in to keep flight attendants on the job last October, what do you think the government’s reaction will be to a strike of mechanics, baggage handlers, electricians and airplane washers. CUPE cancelled a planned walkout of flight attendants last October after intervention by Ms. Raitt made such a move effectively illegal. Air Canada (AC.B-T0.93-0.04-4.12%) would have been able to stay in the air with management staff. But when the mechanics et al go, the airline can’t.

The repeated intervention in the labour affairs of Air Canada, which, the last time I checked, was still a private company, defies all but ballot-box logic. And there is no election on the horizon.

“The government of Canada is committed to doing what it takes to protect the public interest and help unions and employers achieve constructive labour relations,” Ms. Raitt declared.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has surprised the Opposition by saying his party supports giving new powers to Elections Canada that would make it easier to investigate allegations of electoral misdeeds, including calls designed to suppress votes.

Nycole Turmel, the Interim NDP Leader, began the daily Question Period Wednesday by asking if the government would vote in favour of her party’s motion Thursday that would strengthen the abilities of the election agency. The motion would also require all telecom companies that provide voter call services during a general election to register with Elections Canada – and require all customers of these companies to have their identities verified and registered.

Mr. Harper replied that the Conservatives “are not opposed at all to that proposal.”

When the Chief Electoral Officer previously asked the procedures and House affairs committee for the additional powers, the Conservatives on the committee rejected the request.

After the question session ended, NDP MP David Christopherson said it is “wonderful” the Conservatives appear to have changed their minds. But he also seemed puzzled by the move.

MONTREAL—Four people were injured during student protests over tuition-fee hikes as clouds of tear gas wafted Wednesday over downtown Montreal.

All the injuries were minor, although two of the people — one police officer and one protester — were whisked to hospital by ambulance to be treated for trauma.

The scene in Montreal’s streets illustrated the increasingly bitter battle over fees, pitting the Charest government against those who deem the province’s rock-bottom tuition rates an inviolable principle.

It also served to underscore the intense student pushback that has discouraged Quebec governments of the past from increasing rates, which have remained frozen in the province for 33 of the last 43 years as authorities either avoided or abandoned plans for hikes.

Students converged Wednesday on several provincial buildings, including the liquor commission and the education minister’s office, and they momentarily attempted to occupy the Loto-Quebec headquarters which is home to the organization representing university rectors.

Representative Donald Payne, the first-ever African-American congressman
from New Jersey, died Tuesday at the age of 77 from complications of
colon cancer. The former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus was
in his 12th term in the House. In 1988, Payne explained his desire to
break the color line in Congress, saying, "I want to be a congressman to
serve as a role model for the young people I talk to on the Newark
street corners… I want them to see there are no barriers to achievement.
I want to give them a reason to try." That year, Payne handily defeated
his Republican opponent, Michael Webb, and achieved his dream. In a
statement shortly after Payne’s death, President Obama said Payne had
"made it his mission to fight for working families." We discuss Payne’s
legacy with his brother, William Payne, and Larry Hamm, the New Jersey
chairman of the People’s Organization for Progress.

Helmeted and shield-wielding police charged a line of students near Loto-Quebec headquarters as a line of barriers to corral the demonstators was pushed down.

Several students were arrested, some tackled by police who fixed plastic ties around their wrists before hauling them away.

The boom of volleys of tear gas echoed through the street as riot-squad officers laid down a curtain of gas among the protesters, sending many stumbling away coughing and rubbing at their eyes.

Some protesters apparently gained a brief entry at Loto-Quebec headquarters but were moved out. Others jostled a row of police bicycles, while some tossed objects at officers.

The melee was eventually brought under control with lines of police facing mobs of protesters across Sherbrooke Street, one of Montreal's main east-west arteries. Barriers and debris littered the street and a Quebec provincial police helicopter soared above the scene tracking the mob's movements.

OTTAWA - The Conservative government is poised to make good on its election promise and vote in a sweeping crime bill that will swell the prison population and cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

After some minor amendments in the Senate, the bill gets its final vote in the House of Commons tonight — well within the deadline of 100 sitting days promised by Prime Minister Stephen Harper during last spring's federal election campaign.

The government says the bill will lead to safer communities and fewer victims of crime, although it has never set a measurable target for assessing crime reduction.

The bill's many critics — including former tough-on-crime crusaders in the United States — say bitter experience shows that the move to mandatory minimum sentences, longer jail terms and less judicial discretion won't increase public safety but will prove costly.

Questions over the cost of crime measures — and the government's unwillingness or inability to provide a detailed budget — helped spark the contempt-of-parliament charges that led to last spring's election, which the Conservatives turned into a majority mandate.

The Conservatives are expected to pass their controversial omnibus crime bill this week, the first in a series of anti-crime measures the majority government of Stephen Harper has vowed to introduce.

Bill C-10, formerly known as the Safe Streets and Communities Act, encompasses several different pieces of legislation.

Opposition parties, professionals working within the corrections and
justice systems, the Canadian Bar Association and various other interest
groups have raised wide-ranging concerns about the legislation. Below
is an overview of some of their objections.

Mandatory minimums

By
far the most criticized aspect of the bill is the introduction of
mandatory jail sentences for certain crimes, including drug trafficking,
sex crimes, child exploitation and some violent offences. Opponents of
the measures have argued that this type of sentencing has been tried in
other jurisdictions, most notably in the U.S., and has created more
problems than it has solved.

It might be one thing to go after a member of Anonymous had they
hacked a government server and used it to post salacious material about
Public Safety Minister Vic Toews via a web video narrated by the demonic
cousin of a Hooked on Phonics audio lesson. It is completely another
for the government to attempt an honest investigation via parliamentary
committee into that same situation when the video has been uploaded to
YouTube, with its author likely lost to the ether of the web, hidden
behind the smiling face of a plastic Halloween mask and deep within a
Tor connection.

And while Canada’s politicians furrow their brows at the dangers of
“cyberspace”, it’s clear they have hit an end point of sorts.

It seems improbable that the Procedure and House Affairs committee
will have any serious insight into Anonymous apart from what has already
been reiterated in the House before Speaker Scheer’s ruling on Tuesday —
that it’s a phantom organization of relatively unknown size, origin, or
scope that has been held responsible for a number of particular hacking
and protest events around the world. Because even if they conclude that
in this instance Anonymous (or whoever claimed the title this time) has
behaved nefariously, they can’t really even attribute or link that same
potential culpability or even criminality necessarily to any other
event that is rumoured to have been committed by Anonymous, apart from
those for which someone has actually been arrested, tried, and
convicted. Which, at this point, isn’t many.

So here's the little that we know about a pipeline break that occurred more than half a year ago and that British Columbia's Oil and Gas Commission (OGC) feels for whatever reasons the public is best kept in the dark about.

The incident occurred on August 19 of last year when a 35-year-old pipeline broke and spilled its poisonous contents onto a nearby property.

In three separate interviews with three different people who have knowledge of the incident and who spoke on an "information only" basis, it was confirmed that whatever was in the liquids that burst from the broken pipeline that day killed at least one cow and sickened other cattle.

The toxic spill occurred just outside the city limits of Fort St. John, near a liquids waste facility, which takes toxic liquids produced by the oil and gas industry and pressure pumps the untreated wastes deep underground for disposal.

As Latin America shifts away from the influence of the United States, Canada faces some tough decisions.

Canada and the United States were pointedly excluded from the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States
(CELAC), a regional group that was formed in December 2011. The launch
of CELAC symbolizes major transformations in the Western Hemisphere.
U.S. influence is declining, China is stepping up, and Brazil is flexing
its muscle as a regional actor.

Clustered around Brazil and the Common Market of the South (Mercosur)
is the newly formed Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). The more
radical Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) groups Ecuador,
Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Cuba under the leadership of Venezuela.
Importantly, CELAC brings together members of both UNASUR and ALBA,
creating a potential alternative to the Organization of American States
(OAS), which is trapped between conservative critics in Washington and
hostility from leftists in ALBA.

Last October, beachcombers from Oregon to Alaska began noticing a startling number of bulbous, buoyant objects, as smooth and symmetrical as the seeds of some strange and massive fruit, washing up on their shores. They were black, orange, white, and, in rare cases, bore a foreign script scrawled onto their hard surfaces. The beachcombers knew these to be ﬁshing buoys, likely of Japanese origin. They had seen similar ﬂotsam before, though never in such numbers; in many of these new cases, the sea was tossing them up onto remote beaches in bunches—two black, three white—like clustering atoms.

The arrivals did not surprise Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a retired Seattle engineer and oceanographer; he’d been anticipating this. At 69, Ebbesmeyer’s reputation for unusual ﬂotsam savvy stems from an episode 22 years ago, when he followed 80,000 Nike sneakers spilled into the Paciﬁc during a storm, drifting 3,200 km before washing up, in colourful array, on U.S. beaches. That study had allowed him to unknot some hard mysteries about ocean currents; based on those experiences and a series of complex computer simulations, Ebbesmeyer was expecting the Japanese debris, and asked his network of beachcombers to watch for it.

The federal government is worried about the possibility of a strike at Air Canada as early as next week, and says a work stoppage would not be in the best interests of the Canadian public.

"The government is concerned that a strike is possible and is taking this situation very seriously," Labour Minister Lisa Raitt said Wednesday.

March Break travel plans for Canadians were thrown into disarray late Tuesday when the union that represents 8,600 mechanics, baggage handlers and cargo agents at Air Canada issued notice they will go on strike as of 12:01 a.m. ET on March 12 unless a new contract is signed by then.

The union is trying to win back pay and concessions it gave up to help the airline restructure under bankruptcy protection in 2003 and 2004.

In a statement posted on its website, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Local 2323 says, "We are the largest unionized workforce at Air Canada, without us, it's all grounded."

Despite all the anti-Iran rhetoric from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of his government, the Israeli public remains strongly opposed to Israel launching an attack on Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

Writing in Wednesday’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, Prof. Ephraim Yaar and Prof. Tamar Hermann of Tel Aviv University reveal the findings of their most recent Peace Index that show 62 per cent of Israelis are opposed to Israel launching an attack on Iran without U.S. cooperation.

In his just-concluded visit to the United States, Mr. Netanyahu spoke of Israel’s inherent right to pre-emptive self defence, a right acknowledged by U.S. President Barack Obama, though limited to taking such action when a perceived threat is “imminent.” The two men apparently disagreed on when the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons would be imminent, and the U.S. leader said he asked the Israeli not to consider taking a pre-emptive attack until all other actions, such as sanctions and diplomatic pressure, have been exhausted.

While that U.S. approach has earned condemnation from some hard line Israeli columnists and editorialists, it would appear to be in synch with Israeli public opinion.

In 2010, John Fryer, a member of the Order of Canada and an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, attended a campaign school training offered by the Conservative-aligned Manning Centre for Democracy. Last week, as news of the robo-call scandal spread across Canada, he was driven to pen a letter to the editor of major Canadian newspapers about the nature of this training.

The $249 two-day intensive training program took place from January 22-24, 2010, at the Delta Victoria Ocean Point Resort. The event description on the Manning Centre's website read: "With the potential of an election this spring, the skills you learn at this school can make the difference between winning and losing".

The training was dubbed "the most comprehensive campaign manager training ever delivered in Canada" by its organizers, and promised to deliver "the knowledge and skills it takes to win" from "some of the most experienced campaign managers in the country".

Roughly 35 people attended the Manning training. According to Fryer, many of the attendees were attracted to the training to help defeat Liberal incumbent MP Keith Martin in Esquimalt Juan De Fuca. The event’s star-studded slate of speakers included former Press Secretary to Stephen Harper (and current President of Sun Media) Kory Teneycke and David Akin, the National Bureau Chief for Sun Media.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper calls enlisting in the military the “highest form of public service.” Why then is Veterans Affairs, the department which cares for the Canadian Forces when its members are injured, facing the largest proportional cuts of any other public-service department?

The budget axe has been looming over all federal departments. The current “strategic and operational review” is a euphemism for reigning in a federal public service that is out of control. In the last 10 years, the core public service has grown by 34 per cent (versus 12 per cent at Veterans Affairs) and total government program expenses have swelled by 84 per cent (versus 67 per cent at Veterans Affairs).

Perhaps most galling for Canadians who have passed through two recessions in two decades and have seen no real growth in their earnings, public service salaries have increased by 22 per cent over and above inflation.

Few could credibly argue against the need for Ottawa to be managed better.

However, the axe started swinging at Veterans Affairs well before the current budget. As early as 2010, the department offered up more than 500 job cuts to begin this fiscal year. Bureaucrats eager to please Treasury Board then subsequently followed with $223-million in spending cuts in each of the next two years.

The Conservative Party of Canada has repaid taxpayers $230,198 for the "in-and-out" election financing dispute and dropped its appeal at the Supreme Court of Canada.

The party, currently fending off allegations of wrongdoing in the 2011 election over misleading telephone calls to voters, notified the Supreme Court last Friday that it wouldn't proceed with its case against Elections Canada.

The case stemmed from the 2006 election when an Elections Canada auditor raised questions after finding more than 65 nearly identical invoices filed by Conservative candidates for "local" advertising expenses.

Elections Canada looked into the expenses and said the Conservatives violated campaign financing rules by moving $1.3 million in and out of 67 ridings to pay for national ads. The manoeuvres allowed the party to exceed the campaign spending limits and allowed candidates to claim rebates on expenses that weren't incurred, the agency said.

Candidates can be reimbursed by Elections Canada for 60 per cent of their expenses and the national parties can make claims for 50 per cent of their expenses. Elections Canada refused to issue the more than $800,000 in total rebates to the Conservative Party and the party then sued to get the money.

It is hard to believe that the robocall affair that has become the focus of attention on Parliament Hill these past two weeks was orchestrated at the highest levels of the Conservative Party.

It would have been an immensely foolish risk to take for a highly iffy return. To make a decisive difference in the campaign, it would have had to have been a large-scale operation involving a legion of perpetrators - and as is the case with any conspiracy, the chances of it being blown would be proportional to the number of people in the know.

It would appear from the 31,000 complaints that Elections Canada has received from ridings in various parts of the country about automated phone calls during last year's election campaign that it was a widespread operation. But that's not to say all these complaints are founded, or that all the calls crossed the line into illegality.

Many of the complaints are about calls that were simply annoying and deceitful, in that they appeared to come from people posing as Liberal campaign workers but were intended to put people off voting Liberal by being made at awkward times and laced with rudeness. That's dirty pool, but it's not illegal.

As for illegality, the only hard evidence so far has come out of the Ontario riding of Guelph, where people were directed to nonexistent polling stations by calls purporting to come from Elections Canada.

Lets's suppose the world's legitimate scientific
institutions and academies, climate scientists, and most of the world's
governments are wrong.

Maybe, as some people have argued, they're involved
in a massive conspiracy to impose a socialist world order. Maybe the
money's just too damn good. It doesn't matter. Let's just imagine
they’re wrong, and that the polar ice caps aren't melting and the
climate isn't changing. Or, if you prefer, that it’s happening, but that
it’s a natural occurrence -- nothing to do with seven billion people
spewing carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere.

Would it still make sense to continue rapidly
burning the world’s diminishing supply of fossil fuels? Does it mean we
shouldn’t worry about pollution?

We could pretend global warming isn’t happening, or
that humans aren’t a factor if it is. That would be crazy in the face
of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, but even if it weren’t, there
would still be no reason to continue down the road we’re on. Energy is
at the heart of modern society's needs, but when the source is finite,
it seems folly to be hell-bent on using it up in a few generations,
leaving the problems of depletion and pollution to our children and
grandchildren. The longer we delay implementing solutions to our energy challenges the more costly and difficult it will be when we have to face the inevitable.

Opposition MPs are beginning to raise doubts over Elections Canada’s ability to investigate allegations of phone-based vote suppression in the last federal election, but former chief electoral officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley says he believes that the elections monitor will expose the culprits of any electoral fraud.

“In my view this is something that can be handled at the level of Elections Canada and the RCMP. More information will come to the fore and I’m confident that they’ll be able to handle it,” Mr. Kingsley told The Hill Times in an interview last week as the growing controversy over alleged electoral fraud in the last election continued to grow. “We simply have to get to the bottom of it.”

Information on Elections Canada’s ongoing investigation of telephone tactics used last spring continued to surface last week as media reported that the agency was focusing on the Guelph, Ont. riding, where many residents reported automated calls directing them to non-existent polling stations on election day.

On the one side, the Conservatives agree something may have gone wrong in Guelph in the last election, but no one in the national campaign knew about it, and everything else is just so much noise. On the other side, the opposition alleges the governing party may have conducted an organized campaign in ridings across the country to suppress the vote.

In between lies the truth. The job of Elections Canada is to find that truth.

All three parties have done a lousy job of handling the robo-calls affair. The Conservatives have been particularly tin-eared. When the latest allegations arose that people in Guelph, Ont., had received calls purporting to be from Elections Canada sending them to non-existent polling stations, they shrugged, then accused the opposition of exaggerating the problem. Even now, the Tories scatter accusations to the wind: the Liberals themselves are to blame; Elections Canada might have sent out the wrong data.

The Conservatives should have reacted with much greater concern. They should have demonstrably and actively worked to get to the heart of the matter, on their own as well as in co-operation with Elections Canada. They failed to convince anyone that they were as concerned as everyone else.

VANCOUVER - The head of a public inquiry into the Robert Pickton case defended the process Tuesday against allegations it's ignoring the voices of aboriginals, as a lawyer appointed to represent that community resigned and one of the few remaining First Nations groups left in the process pulled out.

Aboriginal activists have long dismissed the inquiry as a lopsided and favouring the police, and the latest departures suggest commissioner Wally Oppal has so far been unable to convince the First Nations community he's committed to listening to them.

The first to leave was Robyn Gervais, an independent lawyer appointed to advance the interests of the aboriginal community, who told Oppal on Tuesday morning that the hearings have been too heavily focused on police and not on the poor native women who overwhelmingly accounted for Pickton's victims.

That prompted the First Nations Summit, which represents many First Nations and tribal councils in British Columbia, to formally withdraw from the inquiry.

With Conservatives targeting a Liberal staffer who posted the sordid details of Vic Toews’s divorce to Twitter, the Speaker of the House has ruled that threatening videos by the hacker group Anonymous violated the Public Safety Minister’s parliamentary privilege.

Andrew Scheer told the Commons Tuesday the Anonymous videos “constitute a direct threat to the minister in particular, as well as all other members” of Parliament.

“These threats demonstrate a flagrant disregard of our traditions and a subversive attack on the most fundamental privileges of this House,” Mr. Scheer said. “As your Speaker and the guardian of those privileges, I have concluded that this aspect – the videos posted on the Internet by Anonymous – therefore constitutes a prima facie question of privilege.”

He invited Mr. Toews to move to have the matter sent to the procedures and House affairs committee. It is unclear how MPs on that committee could call Anonymous to testify, given that its members are, in fact, anonymous.

The Conservatives have gained a lot of political mileage in their support for veterans and have tried to reframe the impending cuts as an attack on government waste.

Prior to the vote, Veterans Affairs Minister Steven Blaney told a House of Commons committee that the reduction in staff is expected to be handled through attrition over five years. But he acknowledged the jobs of pay and benefit sections are being relocated out of Charlottetown.

Just as in the NHL, the House of Commons has its enforcers. Invariably they are young, but not too young; bright, combative, ambitious and sure-footed. These are people trusted by the prime minister to say the right thing, at the right time, without notes, and not put their foot in it too often.

At the height of the sponsorship scandal, Nova Scotia MP Scott Brison played that role for the Liberals. These days, Peterborough MP Dean Del Mastro and Nepean-Carleton MP Pierre Poilievre are skating elbows up for the Conservatives, as they fend off opposition accusations of electoral fraud daily, in question period.

Critics say the enforcers' efforts have been ineffective — or, to use Liberal interim leader Bob Rae's expression, "wacko." Not true. In fact, Del Mastro and Poilievre's efforts are having exactly their intended effect, from a tactical point of view, in the short term. Longer term? Perhaps not.

OTTAWA — The mysterious “Pierre Poutine” at the centre of the robocalls scandal used a real street address in Quebec when he set up an account to send out misleading election day messages and left a digital trail that could help investigators discover his true identity.

The suspect behind the pseudonym spoke to the owner of Edmonton call centre RackNine when he opened an account to use the company’s voice-broadcasting services but gave another, more believable name.

“He did not address himself as Pierre Poutine with me,” said RackNine owner Matt Meier, recounting what appears to be the only known telephone conversation with the shadowy suspect.

“I would not have taken a client with such a stupid name.”

Elections Canada investigators believe a disposable cellphone registered in Poutine’s name and using the fictitious “Separatist Street” in Joliette, Que., was the origin of a disinformation campaign to misdirect voters in Guelph, Ont., and possibly other ridings.

The Scene. Nycole Turmel wondered if the Prime Minister might wish to take a moment to correct the official record.

Last week, she recounted, Mr. Harper had said that only the Liberal party had been involved with American firms to facilitate its telephone campaigning. Alas, she explained, it turned out the Conservative party—or at least some of its candidates—had done likewise. Would the Prime Minister admit that he was wrong? she wondered. And, furthermore, would he admit that the Conservative party had made fraudulent calls?

The Prime Minister was unmoved. “Mr. Speaker, I gave clear answers regarding the activities of the Conservative party of Canada,” he professed. “All this information has been available to Elections Canada since the beginning. Now is the time for the opposition, which has spent millions of dollars to make hundreds of thousands of phone calls, to give all its information to Elections Canada.”

Conservative MP Maurice Vellacott (Saskatoon-Wanuskewin, Sask.) explained the Conservative Party’s central control over candidate campaign voter-information lists in the midst of a growing controversy over alleged attempts by Conservatives to suppress the turnout of voters who supported other parties in the federal election last May.

Mr. Vellacott made the comments as he was elaborating in an interview with The Hill Times about his claim on Monday that Elections Canada may be partly responsible for the controversy after candidate campaign errors were made because of difficulty matching identified voter telephone numbers with what Mr. Vellicott described as Elections Canada voter lists that “too frequently” contain incorrect information about voter addresses.

Ottawa is preparing to shake up the way it funds Canadian research and development, expressing concern that too much federal science cash is flowing to accountants.

Intense lobbying is underway in the run-up to the 2012 budget given that billions of dollars in tax credits for Canadian businesses are riding on the outcome of Ottawa’s new approach. The stakes are high for firms that receive the credits, but also for the large industry of consultants who have carved out a lucrative business helping other firms land the government help.

Gary Goodyear, the federal minister of state for science and technology, is hinting that upcoming changes will aim to limit these added costs, which are being expensed to Ottawa’s $3.5-billion Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) program.

“I’m not concerned about what accountants charge for their everyday business. My concern is simply that that money then moves out of the science, research and development sector and moves over into another area of our economy,” said Mr. Goodyear in an interview.

Canadian crude has become the poor cousin of the oil world, as a confluence of transportation and market factors threaten oil patch profits for months, if not years, to come.

Amid an explosion in oil sands growth, surging Canadian energy output has combined with pipeline problems and rocketing U.S. production to create a supply glut that is severely depressing prices, and profits. Concerns are now rising that the export pipes that sustain Canada’s energy industry are rapidly filling up.

The effect has been severe and broadly felt. Canadian prices, relative to the rest of the continent, are taking one of the largest hits they’ve ever seen.

And it will likely take some time for prices to recover. Major new projects in the oil sands and the red-hot Bakken play in North Dakota are pumping out an extra 400,000 barrels a day every year, according to estimates by Cenovus Energy Inc.

“We are the largest unionized work force at Air Canada. Without us, it’s all grounded,” the IAMAW said in a bulletin to its members.

Air Canada, however, played down the possibility of widespread cancellation to its flights.

“Should a settlement not be reached and the IAMAW commences job action, the airline will endeavour to minimize inconvenience to its customers,” the country’s largest carrier said late Tuesday night. “In the meantime, Air Canada continues to operate its normal schedule without disruption.”

OTTAWA—The Conservative party has dropped an appeal at the Supreme Court of Canada over a 2006 federal election dispute with Elections Canada.

The so-called “in-and-out” dispute began when an Elections Canada auditor looked into the party expenses and said the Conservatives had violated campaign financing rules.

Elections Canada maintains the party funnelled money for national ads through 67 local candidates, allowing the party to exceed its spending limit and allowing candidates to claim rebates on expenses they hadn’t actually incurred within their ridings.

Last November, the Conservative party pleaded guilty to election financing charges and paid the maximum fine of $52,000.

Charges against four senior party officials were dropped as part of the plea deal, which also prevented evidence being made public in court.

The party tried to force Elections Canada to pay rebates to candidates who had claimed the disputed advertising as part of their local campaign expenses.

It won the first round in that battle but lost on appeal. The party later won leave to appeal the matter to the Supreme Court of Canada and a tentative date for a hearing had been set for May 14.

In a statement to the media Tuesday, Fred DeLorey, Conservative party spokesman, said, “We are agreeing to disagree and will be dropping our appeal to the Supreme Court.”

OTTAWA—Elections Canada has extended its probe of phony election calls to include yet another Ontario riding as the watchdog agency launches an online complaint form to help field reports from concerned voters.

Canadians who think “fraudulent calls interfered with their right to vote, or who have information about such calls” are being asked to pass along what they know to elections investigators, it says.

Elections Canada has enlarged its “inquiry” centre to handle the high volume of phone calls and email traffic, agency spokesperson Diane Benson said. The agency has been flooded with reports from voters — 31,000 by last Friday — about harassing or misleading phone calls in the 2011 federal election.

The agency’s experience in quickly ramping up for a federal election is now being used to gear up for the growing investigation, Benson said Tuesday afternoon. “It’s that kind of experience we’re using now to respond.”

She said Elections Canada and the Commissioner of Canada Elections “have the capacity to expand and contract according to needs: electoral needs or investigative demands.”

Seven alleged hackers based in the US, UK and Republic of Ireland have been charged with crimes related to computer attacks said to have affected "over one million victims".

The FBI said that five of the men were involved in the group Lulzsec, while a sixth was a "member" of Antisec.

It said that Lulzsec's "leader" Hector Xavier Monsegur had pleaded guilty in August to 12 criminal charges.

The BBC understands Mr Monsegur subsequently co-operated with the FBI.

It is believed that this action helped lead to the other accusations.

The bureau said that Mr Monsegur - also known as Sabu - had admitted involvement in cyber attacks against the media groups Sony Pictures Entertainment, Fox Broadcasting Company and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) among others.

The Conservative Party of Canada has repaid taxpayers $230,198 for the "in-and-out" election financing dispute and dropped its appeal at the Supreme Court of Canada.

The party, currently fending off allegations of wrongdoing in the 2011 election over misleading telephone calls to voters, notified the Supreme Court last Friday that it wouldn't proceed with its case against Elections Canada.

The case stemmed from the 2006 election when an Elections Canada auditor raised questions after finding more than 65 nearly identical invoices filed by Conservative candidates for "local" advertising expenses.

Elections Canada looked into the expenses and said the Conservatives violated campaign financing rules by moving $1.3 million in and out of 67 ridings to pay for national ads. The manoeuvres allowed the party to exceed the campaign spending limits and allowed candidates to claim rebates on expenses that weren't incurred, the agency said.

A scientist’s duty is to science. Researchers must be able to share their findings, and discuss their published work with peers, journalists and the public in a timely manner.

The Conservative government should not be forcing federal government researchers to vet their remarks through a media-relations office to ensure they are “on-message.” There is no justification for blocking or delaying media interviews just because a scientist’s findings come at a politically inopportune moment. As the U.S. moves to set into place clear integrity guidelines for federal science agencies to promote openness with the press, Canada’s move in the opposite direction is all the more surprising.

Ottawa should respond to the growing controversy – outlined in the prestigious journal Nature – by freeing its scientists. The magazine is calling on the government to show that it will live up to its promise to embrace public access to publicly funded scientific expertise. The issue is serious enough that it was the subject of a panel at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held last month in Vancouver.